Bobby Jindal: “we come together in this body to talk about a very important topic, our Nation's Medicare program. Medicare has served…”

“we come together in this body to talk about a very important topic, our Nation's Medicare program. Medicare has served our country's seniors well. However, this is a program that is in serious need of strengthening and improvement. I was privileged to serve as the executive director of the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare. We spent an entire year looking at the Nation's Medicare program, and we heard from dozens of witnesses. We had countless hearings. I can summarize the challenges facing the program in three ways. First, we have a Medicare program by any measure that is facing a huge financial challenge, a program that is going to go bankrupt, quite frankly, unless we do something differently. We can measure that as a share of the GDP, we can look at the ratio of workers to retirees, we can look at that as a share of payroll taxes, or we can look at the life of the trust funds. Quite simply, we have got a Medicare program today that goes from about four workers per retiree, it is going to eventually be at about two workers per retiree, a trust fund that will not last even long enough for the baby boomers to not only finish retiring, but to finish utilizing their health care services. So the first challenge facing the Medicare program is increasingly we have got a program that is facing solvency challenges.”